The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

These town officers appear to be law enforcement officials who, less than a week after Luke Provine appears in town carrying a black sample case, discover that what he is selling is bootleg whisky, a serious crime in Yoknapatawpha, which like the rest of Mississippi prohibited the sale of alcohol - not only during, but also before and after Prohibition. (Mississippi did not legalize liquor until the 1960s.) The story suggests they arrest Provine for his crime, but allow Major de Spain to "extricate" him from the charge (64).

The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" identifies a group of men who, "since the last year years, cannot find work" (64). The chronological reference probably points to the Great Depression of the 1930s, an era defined by mass unemployment and what the story calls "men among us now whose families are in want" (64).

This group of "ladies," most of whom are likely residents of Jefferson, are described by the narrator as "scurrying and screaming" when the Provine gang, some twenty years earlier, would occasionally "terrorize" them by galloping horses in their midst as they were going to or from church on Sunday mornings (64).

This group represents unnamed people who live in town rather than out in the county. At one point the narrator characterizes them generationally: "younger citizens of the town" who know Luke Provine only as a healthy, shiftless man who “makes no effort whatsoever to support his wife and three children,” and "older men who remember the Butch . . . Provine of twenty years ago," when he still possessed a "driving, inarticulate zest for breathing which has long since burned out of him" (64).

This general group consists of the various residents of Yoknapatawpha County who appear in the story, especially those encountered by Ratliff in his travels as a sewing machine salesman; specifically mentioned are "farmers' wives" at bazaars and sewing bees and "men and women at all-day singings at country churches" (63). This group also includes the few unnamed people referred to in the story who are not included in some other group.

The dead brother of Luke Provine. According to the narrator, it has been "years now" since he, Luke, and another man, Jack Bonds, "were known as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth" (63-64).

The children of Luke Provine. The story makes only one direct reference to them, saying their father "makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64).

Lucius Provine's wife who, the story says, receives no financial support from her husband. The narrator implies she is the principal breadwinner in the family, with money she "earned by sewing and such" (64).

A major character in the story, the man whom the frame narrator calls "Lucius" and Ratliff calls "Luke" Provine is a hanger-on at the hunting camp who is suffering from a persistent case of hiccups and who becomes the butt of a practical joke when he goes to a nearby Indian mound to seek a cure for it. A "tall, apparently strong and healthy man . . . who makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64), he is described by the narrator at the beginning of the story as forty and almost toothless, as well as violent, shiftless and boozy.

Major de Spain has several married daughters who, the unnamed narrator speculates, might have been given a sewing machine by Mrs. de Spain. Manfred is usually depicted as a bachelor, but a son of his is mentioned in "Shall Not Perish." (This De Spain, Manfred, is usually depicted as a bachelor, but a son of his is mentioned in "Shall Not Perish.")